Sick Day (4 page)

7:38 AM

M
idway through my second lap in some scene out of Gran Turismo 6 for the Xbox One, my phone vibrates. I don’t have time to pause the race with its better-than-reality graphics, so I quickly snap up the phone and stare at the jAppe chat.

My heart pounds underneath my chest at the response on the screen.

Hope: Sorry. I can’t. Too much to get done before the big move next week.

Fuck.

And then:

Hope: I’m really sorry :-(

Double-fuck. I type a quick response.

Me: I’ll meet you at the Ogilvie.

Less than three seconds pass before I have her rebuttal.

Hope: Don’t make me embarrass you, Cameron!

Done.

I check the time and determine that 1) she has already boarded the 316 Metra train to Chicago and 2) I don’t have much time left to firm up the details of our day—possibly our
last
day—together before she moves away.

The next thing I do is dial Gordon’s number. Of course he picks up before the first ring has ended; those kids are killing him.

“You need a job,” I tell him, watching the time because I have less than half an hour to get to the train station.

“Funny you should—”

“I need your Tesla, Gordo,” I interrupt, stepping out the of Bat Cave and walking to the front closet. I slide the doors open and stare at my small wardrobe of jackets, shoes, and other fine apparel on one half. The other side is vacant.

“What? No fucking way!”

“I’ll pay your electricity bill for a fucking month. I just need the car.”

“What’s wrong with your BMW?” he asks, his voice pitched high like it always does when he gets anxious.

“It’s not a Bentley.” I file through a couple of jackets and remember the weather forecast for this afternoon—89F. Screw the jacket. I squat to get a closer look at the shoes. Hope will notice the shoes, and the nicer they are, the more relaxed she’ll be. Which means she’ll be more inclined to play sick day with me.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Gordon tells me. “I know what you’re up to, and it’s a fucking horrible idea, Cam.”

“I know.” I grab a pair of Skechers. Not the Chucks, not the Mephistos, or the Hush Puppies, but the brown Skechers. They’re clean and unpretentious. They look good with these jeans, the Tommy’s that make my legs look both lean and solid. “But I’m doing it anyway, Gordo, and I need your car.”

Time check—7:43.

“Can you meet me at the Art Institute at noon?” I ask him.

The huffing and puffing on the other end of the line is an embarrassment. For Gordon. “I can’t give you my car!”

“Is the battery dead? Because if it’s not, I really don’t understand your hesitation. It’s a car, not your firstborn.”

“Not only will Miranda castrate me if she finds out I’m lending it to
you
, of all fucking people, but this is just bad news!”

“Art Institute. Noon. Or you’re flying on your own the next time you have a crazy boy weekend with Josh and Landon.”

I hear some groaning, then Gordon tells Jeffrey it’s not pancake Tuesday, not even close, so eat the damn Rice Krispies, because he’s on the phone. To me, he offers a heavy sigh and asks, “What’s in it for me?”

“I just told you,” I say, keeping my patience in check. “My companionship on the next boys’ trip.”

“Okay, right, yes you said that.” Gordon in panic mode is a time-waster even when he’s coming down off that hyperactive high. “Then tell me what you’re after with Hope. What’s the point of this? I dealt with your bullshit the last time. Remember three years ago? I don’t want Riley hurt again, and I can’t be your accomplice in this.”

I pause at the front door, checking my pockets and making sure I have the keys. My hands feel clammy all of a sudden, and my stomach growls. “I need her to say four words. That’s it. That’s the point.”

“Four words?” He chuckles. “Which ones?”

“’I’m leaving you.’”

“I think that’s three words,” he corrects me, and all traces of chuckling are dead.

“Only if you think the contraction of ‘I’ and ‘am’ reduces it to three, Gordon. So technically, it’s still four words.” I give him a fraction of a heartbeat to say something else. When he doesn’t, I remind him to meet me at the Art Institute at noon. “With the Tesla.”

“Hey, Cam?” he adds, but the tone teeters on begging. “Tell me you’re not going to fuck her once she tells you that she’s leaving you.”

“Oh, those four words aren’t for me. They’re for Matt.”

I hang up before he can realize just how serious I am. Time check—7:47.

I’m left with twenty-eight minutes to reach the Ogilvie Transportation Center, so I have to sprint the one and a half miles. Just to be safe.

}
i {

Two Months Ago

T
he 363 train left downtown Chicago at 7:35 PM. I had attempted to convince Hope to stay out a little longer and grab some drinks or even come see the condo I purchased at a steep discount in 2012, using a good chunk of the Harris severance that I invested and increased seven-fold in less than a few months. But she had insisted on going home.

“Alone,” she added as I joined her on the train.

“No way.” She knew—of course she knew—that I would never let her off that easily.

She rolled her eyes and slid into a forward facing bench, crossing her arms and staring out the green-tinted window. Within minutes, the train started moving, so the awkwardness didn’t last long.

“Do you miss Miami?” I asked as the train emerged from the station and sailed along the tracks into the casual early-evening daylight.

“Isn’t Riley, your
wife
, going to wonder where you are? You haven’t checked your Blackberry the entire time we’ve been out.”

“Neither have you.” I shifted a little closer to her despite the snootiness in her last comment, but she shook her head at me and returned to staring out the window like that might make me disappear. I played it safe, kept the tone soft and playful. “What is it, Hope?”

“I don’t know where you think this is headed,” she told the window, “but it’s not going there.”

“We can’t be friends?”

“You’re clearly incapable of friendship, Cameron.”

“How so?” It had been intended as a joke, but her response insulted me a little. Now I was curious.

“And I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any married man who jumps on a train with me in an attempt to ruin my happy home.”

I let up a bit with my persistence, just in case her mention of a “happy home” had an iota of truth to it. “Riley’s not home tonight. So she doesn’t care if I’m on a train heading into Winnetka or scuba diving with Gordon in the Turks and Caicos like we did last spring. It’s nice there, have you ever been? You’d look really good on those beaches, the sand on your thighs…”

She smiled at my inability to stay focused on a single topic at a time. “Matt won’t be happy if he comes home and finds you in the house.”

I shrugged. “I don’t need to see your bedroom, so I’m fine with sticking to the kitchen like a regular guest. Remember what happened in your kitchen in Miami—”

“Matt still hates you after what happened.” She pulled her attention away from the window so she could look at me.

I allowed an understanding nod. “I can’t really blame him.”

Hope showed me her serious eyes. “So you’re not walking home with me.”

“We’ll see,” I said, showing her my serious eyes, too.

}
i {

A
t the Winnetka station, we disembarked together, but I stayed on the platform and watched Hope walk away while the train bell clamored off the retaining walls, and the big beast rumbled onward. Once she reached the stairs leading up to street level, Hope stepped aside to let the other late commuters pass, and then turned to me as I stood alone, purposely hunching my shoulders and kicking at invisible pebbles like a lost child.

“
Goob!” she called out. And then, when I didn’t respond, “Cameron!”

I raised my attention to her. When she waved me over, I launched into an elaborate and dramatic sprint, something straight out of
Forrest Gump
, projecting my arms out to the side like airplane wings as I got closer to her, then scooping her up off the ground and twirling her around. She didn’t fight me or try to wiggle out of my deathly squeeze. In fact, I even heard a giggle escape before she forced a fake disgusted grunt.

“Let. Me. Go.”

“Never,” I announced, but ended up releasing her anyway. It was getting a little awkward. Even at her featherweight one hundred and twenty pounds, she started to feel a little heavy to my lazy arms after a couple of twirls. “Change your mind about fucking me in the kitchen?”

“Hardy
har har,” she said, glaring at me. “Like I said, you’re incapable of this friendship thing.”

“Who says that anymore?” I asked, ignoring her friendship statement. “Even my dead grandmother doesn’t say ‘hardy
har har.’”

We reached street level, and she pointed past the main intersection. “There’s still a Barney’s across the street. We can have coffee like two friends while we wait for the next train, which is in half an hour.”

“It’ll start getting dark by then,” I said, forcing a frown and shaking my head. “I can’t let you walk home by yourself in the dark.”

Shaking her head, she assured me she would be fine. “I live less than two blocks away; I’ve done it alone before. A lot.” A pause. “You still like Barney’s?”

“Only every day when I’m not running into my soul mate at Panera.”

She punched me in the shoulder. “Cameron! Stop that, or I won’t stick around! And then you’ll have to wait alone for the train.”

For being so close to Chicago, Winnetka felt like its own little village in the middle of some laid-back corner of the country. Despite the time of day, there were couples walking the cozy and somewhat trendy downtown streets. At Barney’s—my favorite boutique espresso bar since Hope had introduced me to the place three years ago—there were couples sitting out front at the bistro tables. It surprised me just how popular this high-caffeine joint could be at this time of night.

Inside, I ordered a biscotti and my usual non-fat double-shot cappuccino. I didn’t hear what Hope ordered; I just paid for it. We sat inside at a table in the back corner, where people wouldn’t waste time bothering us. I imagined this being the same table where Olivia had waited for Oliver, then remembered she had taken a table on the back patio.

“Why not out back?” I wondered.

“This is a compromise, right here,” she explained, poking at the table. “You need to smile more often, Cameron.”

“Remember three years ago?” I asked, testing the waters again. “I think I smiled a lot back then.”

She stirred her drink—either a latté like she used to prefer, or a cappuccino (they looked the same to me in these take-out cups)—even though she hadn’t added anything to it that would require stirring. “No, let’s not do this,” she said with a bit of a sigh.

“That Friday night when you showed up,” I started, glancing up at her to see how she would respond. When she simply stared back, I continued. “I wasn’t expecting you. Not that Friday night or any other night come to think of it. I thought it was over between us. That I was forgotten.”

Her attention lowered to her drink again. Her cheeks looked heavy to me, confirming my assumption that this was the last thing she wanted to talk about tonight.

“I never stopped thinking about you,” I promised. I sipped my hot drink, hoping the liquid would burn some common sense back into me. But it didn’t—it hurt my mouth, but that was about all it achieved. “Every day since and every day before that visit, I thought about you.”

When Hope returned her attention, her eyebrows tightened, and she shook her head at me. I imagined this was the same look she gave her accounting clients when they had some serious tax issues that even David Copperfield
couldn’t fix or make disappear.

I tried to mirror her serious-as-fuck expression. “I don’t have to go back to your place, Hope. I can walk to the train station all by myself. In fact, I don’t have to see you ever again…but the reality remains that I’ll never stop thinking about you. About us.”

“You broke me,” she answered quickly, and the words crushed me. “You seem to forget that, Cameron. We had a promise. A
promise
.” Her voice cracked a little, reminding me of earlier when we were talking about
Our Story
at the beach. This time, she didn’t get up and walk away. She simply took a deep breath to regain her strength. It worked. Now there was strength, hard and merciless, tightening every muscle in her face. “I came for you. I called, I wrote, I tried everything. Do you know what I thought? All those years, I thought I did something. I thought I—”

“And then, when you had me, you pushed me away,” I said, my voice a little louder than I had intended. A few of the people seated around us cast curious glances our way. I remembered Gordon’s eyes on me, the heat of rejection on my skin after a night of loving her, all of her and
just her
. I leaned forward on the small table and whispered, “I gave all of myself to you, Hope. You did nothing wrong, it was all so right, but then I watched you walk away without looking back. What was I supposed to do?”

“I wanted you to
fight
for me,” she said, her scowl stern enough that there was no misunderstanding as to which one of us dominated this conversation. “You said you’d fight for the rest of your life, that you’d always fight for me. For our love.” The bulging vein on her neck suggested anger. “But you didn’t.”

I felt the temperature rising on my cheeks, suddenly wishing I hadn’t agreed to this “friendly” coffee thing. “I gave you
exactly
what you asked for. You’re welcome for that, by the way. You’re welcome for the sacrifices I made, every last one while you lived that perfect life that you
chose
for yourself.”

She shook her head at me, as if she were disgusted with what I had just said. The reality was that she probably recognized just how wrong she was here. Miami was not all that long ago. I doubted that she had forgotten it already.

We sipped on our respective drinks, letting our tempers cool. I could hear a ringing in my ears
—
a sound only Hope could trigger in me—and I recognized that the chatter around us had died down considerably.

I was the first to speak, leaning even closer to her while whispering the words, “I loved you more than I have ever loved anything or anyone else in my life, Hope. It’s irreplaceable.”

“Then why was I crushed more? Because when I found you playing house with Riley…” She couldn’t finish, and looked away instead.

“We were a
month
from getting married,” I reminded her with a hiss.

“But you made a promise to
me
.”

I sat back, ready to give up.

Although she wasn’t crying, she wiped at her eyes. She still looked good for spending so much time in that suit, and I didn’t want to be the one to break that image of perfection. “Forget it, Cameron. This never gets us anywhere.”

“No,” I said. I didn’t care if the people across the street could hear me. “It always brings us right back to this. To this moment where you keep pushing me away.”

“I’m as good as married,” she said, faking a laugh. “You
are
married.” She threw her hands up. “You’re too late. I pushed you away, you walked away, and then we had these years, these wasted years between us. And now you’re just too fucking late because after Labor Day, I’m moving to San Francisco. Happy?”

I finished my
capp in one final sip, then stood. I felt her stare on me, but I refused to look at her. There were a few other guys at Barney’s, watching me to see what I would do. Did they think this was a domestic issue? I wondered and chuckled in my head. But they minded their own business.

I stepped away from the table without saying goodbye to the woman I have loved from the moment I met her, nearly twenty years ago at a neighborhood park.

I walked out to the street, oblivious to everything around me. I knew my way to the train station. Even though I was excessively early, I figured the time alone could help me calm down and figure out how such a great night had gone south so quickly. How had I gone from memorizing each word to wishing I hadn’t seen her at Panera Bread?

Then I heard, “Cameron!”

It was just like yesterday, except this time her voice wore a layer of heartache.

I kept walking. Obviously in my moment of childishness, I didn’t realize that Hope knew how to walk, too. Or run. Because that was
what she did—she ran to catch up to me, her heels betraying any attempt at sneaking up on me that she may have entertained.

“Cameron,” she repeated, her voice firm. “You never listen to me. Never.”

“I’ve listened to your silence for all of these years, Hope. Look what listening has done for me.” I stopped at the intersection because the signal said so. “All you do is keep pushing me away. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just let go of you?”

I turned to face her just as a silver Bentley GT rolled to a stop beside us.

“Shit,” she whispered, and, despite her dry eyes, I saw enough emotion in them to know that she suffered from the same tear in her heart as I did. Our conversation had ended, I saw that, too. “That’s Matt.”

I smiled and waved at the tinted driver’s side window, swallowing that lump of disappointment and burying it deep down like I had for all of these years.

It rolled open. Matt looked pissed. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

“Relax, Matt,” I said, amazed at how someone like Hope could run her fingers through that kind of salt and paper coif, no matter how clean cut he might be. “We were on the same train tonight, it’s all good.”

He didn’t like my bullshit excuse and signaled Hope to the passenger side. She walked away without a word, without even looking back.
Déjà vu, anyone?

“You should know something, Matt,” I said as she climbed into that expensive car, my insides burning and wishing I could step on his douchebag excuse for a face.

“What’s that, dickhead?”

“You might want to change the sheets when you get home.”

I was prepared for him to jump out of the car and chase me, but he was old—probably his mid-forties was my guess—and I figured I’d tire that old geriatric fuck out long before he could ever reach me. Instead, he rolled the window up and drove off at a casual speed. Not even a “fuck you” or middle finger salute; he just drove off.

“That sucked,” I said, then realized I had missed my opportunity to cross the street.

Karma.

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